livre 1. Mesures géométriques et mécaniques.

Quelle a été la place des femmes dans la vie religieuse au Moyen Âge, quand on sait que le millénaire médiéval est imprégné de christianisme, que la femme est par essence inférieure à l’homme et sa sujette, donc d’abord écartée du sacerdoce? Les images qui surgissent sont fortement contradictoires. L’ombre de grandes figures surgit. Les unes«s’élevant au dessus de leur sexe » : martyres, prophétesses, mystiques, fondatrices, savantes ; d’autres en incarnant les pires tares : les hérétiques et les sorcières. (...) Mais qu’en est-il de l’immense troupeau discret qui cherche son salut dans des monastères toujours trop peu nombreux, les béguinages ou les tiers ordres qu’invente le bas Moyen Âge sans jamais combler, semble-t-il, ni les aspirations spirituelles ni les besoins sociaux, économiques et culturels auxquels sont censées répondre les structures d’encadrement de la vie religieuse? (shrink)

Quelle a été la place des femmes dans la vie religieuse au Moyen Âge, quand on sait que le millénaire médiéval est imprégné de christianisme, que la femme est par essence inférieure à l’homme et sa sujette, donc d’abord écartée du sacerdoce ? Les images qui surgissent sont fortement contradictoires. L’ombre de grandes figures surgit. Les unes « s’élevant au dessus de leur sexe » : martyres, prophétesses, mystiques, fondatrices, savantes ; d’autres en incarnant les pires tares : les hérétiques (...) et les sorcières. Mais qu’en est-il de l’immense troupeau discret qui cherche son salut dans des monastères toujours trop peu nombreux, les béguinages ou les tiers ordres qu’invente le bas Moyen Âge sans jamais combler, semble-t-il, ni les aspirations spirituelles ni les besoins sociaux, économiques et culturels auxquels sont censées répondre les structures d’encadrement de la vie religieuse ? (shrink)

The Hermit’s Hut offers an original insight into the profound relationship between architecture and asceticism. Although architecture continually responds to ascetic compulsions, as in its frequent encounter with the question of excess and less, it is typically considered separate from asceticism. In contrast, this innovative book explores the rich and mutual ways in which asceticism and architecture are played out in each other’s practices. The question of asceticism is also considered—as neither a religious discourse nor a specific cultural tradition but (...) as a perennial issue in the practice of culture. The work convincingly traces the influences from early Indian asceticism to Zen Buddhism to the Japanese teahouse—the latter opening the door to modern minimalism. As the book’s title suggests, the protagonist of the narrative is the nondescript hermit’s hut. Relying primarily on Buddhist materials, the author provides a complex narrative that stems from this simple structure, showing how the significance of the hut resonates widely and how the question of dwelling is central to ascetic imagination. In exploring the conjunctions of architecture and asceticism, he breaks new ground by presenting ascetic practice as fundamentally an architectural project, namely the fabrication of a “last” hut. Through the conception of the last hut, he looks at the ascetic challenge of arriving at the edge of civilization and its echoes in the architectural quest for minimalism. The most vivid example comes from a well-known Buddhist text where the Buddha describes the ultimate ascetic moment, or nirvana, in cataclysmic terms using architectural metaphors: “The roof-rafters will be shattered,” the Buddha declares, and the architect will “no longer build the house again.” As the book compellingly shows, the physiological and spiritual transformation of the body is deeply intertwined with the art of building. The Hermit’s Hut weaves together the fields of architecture, anthropology, religion, and philosophy to offer multidisciplinary and historical insights. Written in an engaging and accessible manner, it will appeal to readers with diverse interests and in a variety of disciplines—whether one is interested in the history of ascetic architecture in India, the concept of “home” in ancient India, or the theme of the body as building. (shrink)

The Hermit’s Hut offers an original insight into the profound relationship between architecture and asceticism. Although architecture continually responds to ascetic compulsions, as in its frequent encounter with the question of excess and less, it is typically considered separate from asceticism. In contrast, this innovative book explores the rich and mutual ways in which asceticism and architecture are played out in each other’s practices. The question of asceticism is also considered—as neither a religious discourse nor a specific cultural tradition but (...) as a perennial issue in the practice of culture. The work convincingly traces the influences from early Indian asceticism to Zen Buddhism to the Japanese teahouse—the latter opening the door to modern minimalism. As the book’s title suggests, the protagonist of the narrative is the nondescript hermit’s hut. Relying primarily on Buddhist materials, the author provides a complex narrative that stems from this simple structure, showing how the significance of the hut resonates widely and how the question of dwelling is central to ascetic imagination. In exploring the conjunctions of architecture and asceticism, he breaks new ground by presenting ascetic practice as fundamentally an architectural project, namely the fabrication of a “last” hut. Through the conception of the last hut, he looks at the ascetic challenge of arriving at the edge of civilization and its echoes in the architectural quest for minimalism. The most vivid example comes from a well-known Buddhist text where the Buddha describes the ultimate ascetic moment, or nirvana, in cataclysmic terms using architectural metaphors: “The roof-rafters will be shattered,” the Buddha declares, and the architect will “no longer build the house again.” As the book compellingly shows, the physiological and spiritual transformation of the body is deeply intertwined with the art of building. The Hermit’s Hut weaves together the fields of architecture, anthropology, religion, and philosophy to offer multidisciplinary and historical insights. Written in an engaging and accessible manner, it will appeal to readers with diverse interests and in a variety of disciplines—whether one is interested in the history of ascetic architecture in India, the concept of “home” in ancient India, or the theme of the body as building. (shrink)

In this review, I argue that Chōmei’s hermitism can be another realistic strategy to respond to Nagasawa's argument that only transcendentalism can constitute a potentially successful response to the problem of impermanence. Chōmei lived in a small house in the remote mountains and interacted with the surrounding nature. His lifestyle is considered a good example of reconciling one’s finite life with the impermanence of the world and human sufferings. I conclude that Nagasawa’s interpretation of hermitism might be one-sided.

The notions of literacy and citizenship have become technologised through the demands for measurable learning outcomes and the reduction of these aspects of education to sets of skills and competencies. Technologisation is understood here as the systematisation of an art, rather than as intending to understand technology itself in negative terms or to comment on the way technology is used in teaching and learning for literacy and citizenship. Technologisation is approached here in terms of the understanding of literacy and citizenship (...) as things that one has. Drawing on the phenomenology of Gabriel Marcel the understanding of literacy and citizenship in terms of having is problematised, as is the distinction between having and being. This opens the way for a richer understanding of being literate and being a citizen explored through the figures of the Hermit and the Poet in Thoreau's Walden. Being literate and being a citizen are brought together here in order to consider the implications of their technologisation for academic writing in the university. The question of what we write in the name of in the university is considered in the light of this and of a particular notion of the public. (shrink)

Birdsong is widely analysed and discussed by people coming from both musical and scientific backgrounds. Both approaches provide valuable insight, but I argue that it is only through combining musical and scientific points of view, as well as perspectives from more tangentially related fields, that we can obtain the best possible understanding of birdsong. In this paper, I discuss how my own training as a musician, and in particular as a composer, affects how I listen to and parse birdsong. I (...) identify nine areas of overlap between human music and birdsong, which may serve as starting points both for musical and scientific analysis, as well as for interdisciplinary analysis as practiced in the developing field of “zoomusicology.” Using the hermit thrush (Catharus guttatus) as an example, I discuss how the song of a single species has been described by writers from a variety of disciplines, including music, literature, and the sciences, as well as how we can contextualise these varied perspectives in terms of broader cultural thought trends. I end with discussion of how combining approaches from multiple fields can help us to figure out new questions to ask, can help us identify how our own cultural biases may affect how we hear birdsong, and ultimately can help us develop richer and more nuanced understandings of the songs themselves. (shrink)

The hermit posed a challenge to a medieval Church that emphasized rule, order, and discipline since oversight of their life could be virtually non-existent. The writings of Richard Rolle, hermit, negotiates the space between Foucauldian exomolgesis and exoagouresis as Rolle strove to articulate the identity of the hermit without any kind of church endorsement. As well, he forged his life out of a struggle with concepts of medieval sin, specifically Pride, which placed him in a queer position in terms of (...) relationships with his surrounding community. His way of life was highly influential in his local community, however, and, through manuscript dissemination, beyond. Because he experienced mystical visions without church oversight, his eremitic life and example inspired a movement toward lay, affective piety in the later Middle Ages. The hermit, in his case, challenges the medieval Church’s hierarchy in that hermits practice a form of living at a local level, placing them in dangerous, sometimes heretical, positions that force the Church to either absorb their practices or suppress them. (shrink)

The election of Roh Tae Woo marked the beginning of a new stage in Korean politics: "the period of Korean-style democracy." Myers follows events leading up to this change and predicts a less threatening, less Confucian politics for the Korea of the future.

"Yang Xiong is the most useless of all. He was truly a rotten Confucian."Zhu Xi (11301200 A.D.)With this comment from Song Dynasty Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi, the work of Han Dynasty philosopher Yang Xiong (53 B.C.18 A.D.) was effectively relegated to the dustbin of Chinese intellectual history. While influential in the Later Han as the clearest expression of the Old Text Confucian school, Yang's Fa yan has received little attention from Western scholars and appears here in a rare annotated English translation.Written (...) during the transition between the Former and Later Han Dynasties, the Fa yan is a notoriously elusive text that was stylistically modeled on the Analects of Confucius. Denigrated by later Neo-Confucians for his association with Han usurper Wang Mang, Yang Xiong served both the Former Han and Xin imperial courts as a court poet and scholar, and was well known for being a reclusive personality, earning him a reputation as a "hermit at court." Most famous for his position that human nature is a mixture of good and evil, Yang Xiong's philosophy stands in clear contrast to the syncretic Confucianism of his day as a reformer's vision of proper self-cultivation and statecraft.This volume presents an annotated translation of the entire text, focusing on the passages that elucidate Yang's discussion of the core concepts of the Confucian school. The translator's commentary traces the text's major philosophical concepts to their roots in Warring States era philosophy, noting stylistic and conceptual allusions to the Analects and Mencius, among other texts. Also included are a discussion of Yang's biography and the influence of the eremitic ideal on his life and thought. (shrink)

The Liber de compositione alchemiae or the The Book of the Composition of Alchemy is believed to have been the first book on alchemy that was translated from Arabic into Latin. The translator was the Englishman Robert of Chester who was one of the earliest translators to flock to Spain to learn Arabic and to translate some of the Arabic works. He completed his translation on 11 February, 1144.

In this study we focus on the phenomenon of anakhóresis in the context of Roman domination of Egypt, specifically related to the period of the episcopate of Athanasius in his chair in Alexandria. From that perspective, we analyze the very action of anakhoreîn carried by the bishop of Alexandria on his dangerously biographical way, in which he was exiled by the emperors and had to escape several times, the last three to the desert. Finally, taking up the notion of anakhoreîn, (...) the departure to the desert, while monk‟s moving to a isolation from a cultural and coeval, milieu as a concept discursively constructed in the narrative of Vita Antonii, composed by Athanasius in the IVth century AD, resuming and revising Hadot's concepts of 'spiritual exercise' and Michel Foucault‟s 'practice of the self '. (shrink)

From humans to hermit crabs to deep water plankton, all living things compete for locally limiting resources. This universal truth unites three bodies of thought--economics, evolution, and history--that have developed largely in mutual isolation. Here, Geerat Vermeij undertakes a groundbreaking and provocative exploration of the facts and theories of biology, economics, and geology to show how processes common to all economic systems--competition, cooperation, adaptation, and feedback--govern evolution as surely as they do the human economy, and how historical patterns in both (...) human and nonhuman evolution follow from this principle.Using a wealth of examples of evolutionary innovations, Vermeij argues that evolution and economics are one. Powerful consumers and producers exercise disproportionate controls on the characteristics, activities, and distribution of all life forms. Competition-driven demand by consumers, when coupled with supply-side conditions permitting economic growth, leads to adaptation and escalation among organisms. Although disruptions in production halt or reverse these processes temporarily, they amplify escalation in the long run to produce trends in all economic systems toward greater power, higher production rates, and a wider reach for economic systems and their strongest members.Despite our unprecedented power to shape our surroundings, we humans are subject to all the economic principles and historical trends that emerged at life's origin more than 3 billion years ago. Engagingly written, brilliantly argued, and sweeping in scope, Nature: An Economic History shows that the human institutions most likely to preserve opportunity and adaptability are, after all, built like successful living things. (shrink)

We define rational Hermite interpolants to vector-valued functions and show that, in the context of Clifford algebras, the numerator and denominator polynomials belong to a complex extension of the Lipschitz group. We also discuss the problem of constructing an algebraic representation for the generalized inverse of a vector, which is at the heart of the usual development of vector rational approximation.

It seems obvious that a community of one thousand scientists working together to make discoveries and solve puzzles should arrange itself differently than would one thousand scientist-hermits working independently. Because of limited time, resources, and attention, an independent scientist can explore only some of the possible approaches to a problem. Working alone, each hermit would explore the most promising approaches. They would needlessly duplicate the work of others and would be unlikely to develop approaches which look unpromising but really (...) have tremendous potential. Contrariwise, a large community can more rigorously explore the space of possible approaches. Most scientists should work on the most promising approaches, but a smaller number can be committed to approaches that initially look less promising. Exploratory work can reveal if one of those initially unpromising approaches has unrealized potential, and more scientists can adopt it once its potential becomes more apparent. (shrink)

Those who live in retirement, whose lives have fallen amid the seclusion of schools and other walled-in and guarded dwellings, are liable to be suddenly and for a long while dropped out of the memory of their friends, the denizens of a freer world … there falls a stilly pause, a wordless silence, a long blank of oblivion. Unbroken always is this blank, alike entire and unexplained. The letter, the message once frequent, are cut off, the visit, formerly periodical, ceases (...) to occur; the book, paper, or other token that indicates remembrance, comes no more. Always there are excellent reasons for these lapses if the hermit but knew them. Though he is stagnant in his cell, his connections without are whorling in the very vortex of life … The hermit – if he be a sensible hermit – will swallow his own thoughts, and lock up his own emotions during these weeks of inward winter… (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, 1979: 348). (shrink)

'By far the safest and most rational exposition of Eastern metaphysics and the practice of mental discipline that I have read.' Spectator The Quest of the Overself shows Western readers how to achieve serenity of mind, control of thought and desire, and the power to use higher forces by means of simple exercises. These include breathing and visualisation as well as mental control through meditation. These ideas, which the author gained by extensive travel in India, are as relevant to us (...) today as they were when first published in 1937. Paul Brunton was a British philosopher, mystic and traveler. He left a successful journalistic career to live among yogis and holy men and studied a wide variety of Eastern and Western esoteric spiritual traditions. As he explains in the still fresh and fascinating The Quest of the Overself, meditation and the quest for inner peace are by no means exclusively for monks and hermits but also support those living everyday, active lives in the West. (shrink)

Ce volume est issu d’une journée d’étude tenue en 2005 à l’initiative du groupe Questes qui à Paris IV coordonne les recherches de médiévistes littéraires. Après la belle introduction de Jean-Jacques Vincensini, qui reprend les conclusions des différentes contributions en les amplifiant et en les situant dans un cadre plus nettement anthropologique, l’ouvrage compte sept communications ; s’y ajoutent une substantielle conclusion de Paulette L’Hermite-Leclercq et une brève post-face d’Élisabet...

From the known coordinate representation of these operators, a unified treatment of the abstract operators for curvilinear coordinates and their canonically conjugate momenta is given for systems in three dimensions. A configuration representation, corresponding to classical configuration space, exists in which description is simplified; the three-dimensional ket space factors into a direct product of one-dimensional spaces. Four cases are examined, according to the range of the continuous curvilinear coordinate. In addition to normalization of momentum eigenstates to the Kronecker delta for (...) finite range of coordinate and normalization to the Dirac delta for range on the entire real axis, normalization occurs to δ (or δ+) for range on the positive (or negative) part of the real axis. The domain of Hermiticity of curvilinear coordinate and conjugate momentum operators in each case is the entire three-dimension ket space. The fundamental commutation relations hold in all representations. Statements to the contrary for the radial and azimuth coordinates in spherical polar coordinates are seen to be erroneous. (shrink)

"Der Text vergleicht zwei fetischistische Puppenexperimente des 20. Jahrhunderts. Auf der einen Seite steht der vielbeachtete Versuch Oskar Kokoschkas, die verlorene Alma Mahler durch eine lebensechte Puppe zu ersetzen. Auf der anderen Seite geht es um die verborgen gehaltenen Bücher des Schweizer Einsiedlers Armand Schulthess, bevölkert von Hunderten von erotischen Collage-Frauen, die kunstvoll zusammengeklebt, vernäht und ineinander gefaltet sind. So unterschiedlich das zugrundeliegende fetischistische Ritual auch ausfällt, so zeigt sich in beiden Anordnungen doch eine grundlegende Übereinstimmung: In beiden Fällen nimmt (...) das Inkarnieren die Form einer Operationskette an, die das Bild ins Register einer mimetischen Transformationsontologie überstellt. The paper compares two fetishistic experiments with puppets of the 20th century. On the one hand, there is Oskar Kokoschka’s much discussed attempt to replace the lost Alma Mahler with a life-size doll. On the other hand, the paper treats the secret books of Swiss hermit Armand Schulthess, populated by hundreds of erotic women, which are artfully glued, sewn and folded together. However different the underlying fetishistic ritual may be, the two groups show a fundamental agreement: In both cases, the process of incarnating becomes a chain of operations, translating the image into the register of a mimetic ontology of transformation. ". (shrink)

In the paper, a detailed analysis of some new logical aspects of Cantor’s diagonal proof of the uncountability of continuum is presented. For the first time, strict formal, axiomatic, and algorithmic definitions of the notions of potential and actual infinities are presented. It is shown that the actualization of infinite sets and sequences used in Cantor’s proof is a necessary, but hidden, condition of the proof. The explication of the necessary condition and its factual usage within the framework of Cantor’s (...) proof makes, Cantor’s proof invalid. It’s shown that traditional Cantor’s proof has a second necessary, but hidden as well, condition which is teleological by its nature, i.e., is not mathematical. The explication of the second necessary condition makes Cantor’s statement on the uncountability of continuum unprovable from the point of view of classical logic.One of the most dramatic facts in history of science is connected just with the notion of actual infinity and consists in the following. On the one hand, Aristotle, Berkeley, Locke, Descartes, Spinoza, Gauss, Kant, Cauchy, Kronecker, Hermite, Poincaré, Bair, Borel, Brouwer, Quine, Wittgenstein, Weyl, Luzin, and a lot of other outstanding creators of classical logic and classical mathematics, during millenniums, stated categorically and insistently warned about that the actual infinity is a self-contradictory notion and its usage in mathematics is inadmissible (e.g., according to Poincare, “There is no actual infinity. - Cantorians forgot that and fell into contradictions. Later generations will regard Mengenlehre (set theory) as a disease from which one has recovered”). On the other hand, a lot of outstanding scientists of the XX c.c., such as Hilbert, Church, Turing, Gödel, etc., and modern axiomatic set theory as a whole ignored this (intuitive though) opinion of genii and accepted Cantor’s “transfinite paradise”, based on the actual infinity. In the paper some logical, philosophical, and psychological aspects of this historical “favorable opposition” are analyzed, and the fact that the scientific intuition of genii has won the historical battle against the mytho-’logic’ of Cantor’s transfinite ‘paradise’ is explained and logically justified. (shrink)

There are at least two senses in which human beings can be called “naturally artificial”: being adapted for creation of and participation in niche constructed environments, and being adapted for creation of and participation in such environments despite an exceptional indeterminacy in the details of the niche constructed environments themselves. The former puts human beings in a common category with many niche-constructing organisms while the latter is arguably distinctive of our species. I explain how this can be so by developing (...) an account of supporting concepts of complexity, contingency, and content-openness, and show how to defend the position against a common style of objection by a single comparative case study: hermit crabs and their shells versus humans and their movable dwellings. Finally, I consider evidence that such a feature is indeed species-typical and evolved in human populations. (shrink)

2010 Reprint of 1935 American Edition. Illustrated Edition. Paul Brunton (1898 - 1981) was a British philosopher, mystic, traveler, and guru. He left a journalistic career to live among yogis, mystics, and holy men, and studied Eastern and Western esoteric teachings. Dedicating his life to an inward and spiritual quest, Brunton felt charged to communicate his experiences about what he learned in the east to others. His works had a major influence on the spread of Eastern mysticism to the West. (...) Taking pains to express his thoughts in layperson's terms, Brunton was able to present what he learned from the Orient and from ancient tradition as a living wisdom. His writings express his view that meditation and the inward quest are not exclusively for monks and hermits, but will also support those living normal, active lives in the Western world. Brunton is credited with introducing Ramana Maharshi to the West through his books A Search in Secret India and The Secret Path. (shrink)

The question of how literary fiction is used for political and ideological propaganda involves both textual and contextual comparative analysis. Using recent discussions of the literary genre of prophecy, Mehtonen explores the case of a hitherto unexplored anonymous fictional publication from 1770, which became a literary sensation and was soon translated from German into Danish, Russian, Swedish, Finnish and Dutch. Mehtonen shows how this narrative – about the 106-year-old Swiss hermit Martin Zadeck, who presented on his deathbed in 1769 a (...) prophecy about the coming of a powerful united Northern Europe – was closely attached not only to emerging ideas of Europe and its transoceanic expansion after the Seven Years War (1756–1763), but also to topical trends in the utopian fiction of the nobility and military networks in the Northern European monarchies. Mehtonen concludes that the seemingly simple prophecy by Zadeck, often catalogued as »devotion literature«, in fact addressed multiple audiences and even clashing worldviews. The monarchic and colonialist ideas of the narrative appealed to royalist patriots; the legendary and mythological layers were immediately evident to readers familiar with the Rosicrucian and Hermetic underpinnings; the millenarian vision pleased the eschatological mindset of proponents of religious awakening movements; and, ultimately, the Zadecksche Gattung was food for enlightened critiques and philosophies concerning superstition. (shrink)

Carmelo Bene is not simply to be counted among the "big players" of the twentieth century, but is the author of a "genetic mutation" in theater practice. There are, in Asia, some hermits puppeteers who daily set up a show for the gods, that is for anyone, but anyone to pass, human or animal, is welcome. Acting for the desert means to embody a posture that goes beyond the duality between nature and artifice: event that bases its effectiveness in (...) gratitude, in the surplus of life that goes from the emptiness outside to the inner one, infinitely small. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Spiritual AuthorityA Christian PerspectiveKarl BaierOne could define spiritual authority as the power to support the opening of the entire universe —and especially of the life of human beings—toward union with the redeeming ultimate reality. Christian tradition knows several holders of this power: God, Jesus Christ, the angels, the saints and priests, spiritual guides, and last but not least each and every Christian and person of goodwill. They all are (...) spiritual authorities and together create a field of liberating power with many interdependent centers. One can conceive of spiritual authority in Christianity as a complex interplay between these various forces. The manifestation of spiritual power through them does not take place for its own sake, or to celebrate the holder of spiritual authority, but to empower other centers. Thus, spiritual power is not private property. It is only real insofar as it is passed on to others. In the field of human spiritual authority, tensions and struggles arise if the flow of authority is blocked by a particular center attempting to monopolize spiritual power for the establishment of an illusionary self-identity.Rather than going into an analysis of the entire field, I would like to take a closer look at one of its facets: “spiritual guides,” those who are acknowledged specialists in helping others to a life in the presence of God. Of course, other centers of spiritual authority will sooner or later also come into the picture, because in the field of spiritual power one authority cannot be understood without the others. Fields of other forms of power and their centers of authority (scriptural authority, political authority, etc.) also influence and partially permeate the field of spiritual authority, but that is a subject for another enquiry.Spiritual Guidance in the History of ChristianityA central socioreligious form of spiritual authority manifests itself within relationships of spiritual guidance, or (to use the common Christian phrase) within spiritual direction. The remaining part of this paper deals with concepts of spiritual direction and ways of understanding the authority of the director in his or her relationship to [End Page 107] the directee within Christian spiritual life. Before looking into the current situation, I will highlight some milestones in the history of Christian spiritual guidance.From late antiquity onward, spiritual authority was accepted within Christian communities as a specific form of authority, quite different from other forms and especially different from the authority of the clergy to lead the Church.The earliest context in which this difference appeared coincides with the beginning of spiritual direction. Spiritual direction in Christianity originated as a monastic concept.1 “Historically it was from the movement of desert monasticism that we received the idea of spiritual direction within the framework of Christian practice.”2 As abba (“father”) and amma (“mother”) ascetics, holy men or women, like the hermits of the Egyptian desert who lived on the periphery of the socioreligious zone controlled by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, functioned as independent spiritual authorities for their fellow monks and nuns as well as for people from further afield who visited the desert to ask for spiritual advice. As one can imagine, the relationship between the two forms of authority was complex, and one can observe tensions and attempts at reconciliation between the authority of the charismatic ascetics and the authority of the bishops, as well as between ascetical ideals taken from monasticism and the pastoral care for lay Christians from the fourth to the sixth century.3The Decretum Gelasianum, an official document dating back to the beginning of the sixth century, assessed that the vitae patrum—the books containing narratives of the lives and the spiritual teachings of the desert fathers—were to be accepted by the Church as valid teaching with all honor (cum omni honore suscipimus). The use of the term “father” in this text indirectly confirms that no ordination was necessary to receive this honorary title and the ministry connected to it. Most of the fathers acknowledged by the Decretum Gelasianum have never been ordained priests.When the desert tradition was superseded by organized monasticism, the charismatic authority of the abba or amma became institutionalized in the form of monastery rules, which functioned... (shrink)